The main tournament of the season, the national champion-ship for teams, again sponsored by Hennessy, was won by Marie Farrugia, Albert Sacco, Anna Vella and Nathalie Marlin.
This quartet took the lead in the first round, then had a disastrous second round dropping four places, but played solidly in the last two rounds climbing back to the top position.
Bjarni Kristjansson, Svetlana Roukhliada, Kathy Williams and David Oliver finished in second place and Joan Consiglio, Irene Naudi, Charles Assouline and Graham Penney were third.
The Malta Bridge Club tourna-ment for teams was also won by Farrugia, Sacco, Vella and Marlin.
Just one point behind were Consiglio and Naudi, this time partnered by Bulgaria boys Alex Andreev and Stanko Grammatikov.
Mario Dix, Margaret Parnis England, Assouline and Penney were third.
World pairs
The Malta Bridge Association also organised a heat in this year’s World Wide Simultaneous pairs tournament at the Union Club.
In all, 5,328 pairs from 265 clubs, spreading all the way from Argentina to New Zealand, parti-cipated.
The top three positions from Malta were Josephine Gerada and Carmen Gaffiero in 77th place, Dix and Parnis England (153rd) and Albert Ganado and May Sultana (723rd).
With such a huge number of players participating in this international tournament, some fairly reliable and interesting statistics emerged.
For example, in our case, all three leading pairs were sitting East West. Whilst it is true that the next three positions were oc-cupied by North South players, it remains a fact that arrow swit-ching a Mitchell movement does produce some odd results.
Why the organisers insist on arrow switching is difficult to understand.
After all, it is indisputable that in the pairs Mitchell movement you have distinctly two com-petitions, one between all the North South pairs, who all played the same 26 cards of each board, and, similarly for East West.
Why change a reasonably accurate measuring rod for some-thing which is dubious?
A simple analysis of the first ten positions on the final ranked list shows that on average, these top ten pairs played a surprising 60.9 per cent of the hands from the East West position.
This is a far cry from the ex-pected 50 per cent and indicates a strong imbalance in scoring mostly created by the unneces-sary arrow switching.
The statistics for Board 2 are also very interesting.
Experts of the pairs game will tell you, “It hardly ever pays to bid the grand slam in a simple, match pointed, Mitchell tourna-ment”.
For example, on this board, 7 no trump scored 97.5% and 7 Hearts – 95.3%.
Whereas if you bid the con-servative small slam in no trumps or Hearts and, of course, made all 13 tricks, you scored a fairly generous 85.3 per cent.
Is the risk of contracting for the grand slam really worth it?
This was the deal.
Board 2 – Dealer East. North South vulnerable.
The standard play of the Dia-monds is Ace from hand first.
Unfortunately, you now discover that the Diamond suit is only going to yield three tricks. So, next you turn your eyes on the other red suit.
With the lucky lie of the Heart suit, 12 tricks make with ease.
Now you must try the Spade finesse for your 13th trick while you are still in control of all suits.